It should be far from me, a man who lists his professions as fisherman and farmer, to complain about the price of locally produced rice, but, in the middle of a terrible pandemic that has thousands of our brothers and sisters near starvation, I have to ask why the price of the tasty Scharf cheese went up. Are the dairy farmers really cutting it that close, or is it just business as…normal?
I don’t follow the cost of goods so closely that an incremental increase won’t slip by me, but my nose is too large for a big jump to go unnoticed. A couple weeks ago, my eyebrows went up when I paid for my cheese, but I said, maybe it was an error in the labeling. This week just past, I said I’d better check more closely, and my mouth went wa, this cheese in my hand used to cost between 5 and 6 dollars, is that really an 8? Wow, the price gaahn up.
Belize is proud of its healthy, grass-fed livestock, cattle and sheep and goats, and while the cost of grass could inch up because of increased cost of certain inputs, it would take a drought or a flood to make the price jump. In the dairy industry, there are other factors that affect the cost of producing milk: dairy animals also get supplemental feed, so it is likely that the farmers aren’t making as much as they did before. It’s not impossible that it is just my shop making adjustments, but I have been told that the price is up at another shop too. Maybe they had to raise the price of cheese. Ouch.
Please patch up that kwaaril
Last week the famous NFL coach, Jon Gruden, of the Los Angeles Raiders, handed in his resignation after some old communication of his revealed language that was racist, homophobic, and some say, if I’m not mistaken, misogynist. I don’t have any big sympathy for him, because he is major league rude, and also because he doesn’t need it, the man is a multi-millionaire.
Commenting on his speech, one of his former players, Amari Cooper, kindly described him as “impulsive”, and another of his former players, Keyshawn Johnson, said the man is a bad guy, and a fraud. No one gives a daam about the love between players and their coaches; in sports it’s all about performance on the field, but there are personal feelings, and Amari has a somewhat different take from Keyshawn.
Well, words flew from Gruden’s mouth some years ago, and he and the sport he grew up with and has loved all his life have now parted ways. Words can cause trouble, and what I’m about today is throwing a little cold water on things being said between parties I like. These words flying out of control could lead to another party I like getting the upper hand, and getting something they want and shouldn’t get and can’t handle. Our friends in that third party should never get the power to fling open the closet door.
Louis Wade has become very popular because he has a television station, Plus TV, and he hosts a talk show on which he talks much about things social and in the political arena. Things social and the political arena are always hot news, and the evangelicals at Plus TV have broken down the church door and brought their pulpit into the public. All Belize’s evangelicals have been on page for ages; they fight the same enemies, but they’ve split over the vax, and what we have here now is potentially a Lutheran type split, if cold water doesn’t rain down to cool things off.
I am pretty sure that devil Chebat is not trying to split the evangelicals, but the pandemic is a life-and- death matter, and he might have to draw a line. It’s possible that some church leaders have decided on their own to lock out the anti-vax…. whatever, there is a divide, whipped up over what scripture says about taking this vaccine. An edict that only vax can go to church is being discussed, and if that comes to pass, it will leave one half of the evangelicals outside the church door.
The evangelicals, all 100% of them, are critically important in the fight to keep gay men from taking their sexual discussion into the primary schools, which they want to do. See, when they adopt children, yes, in certain parts of the world they are allowed to adopt children, they want the kids already indoctrinated into accepting that it’s all kosher for daddy and daddy to go into that bigger than a closet space we call a bedroom.
No, no, no, that is not on base. If sober heterosexuals can accept that all their kinkiness, affairs outside of pure procreation, is mischief, why can’t gays…are there no sober gays? What is it with this need by modern people to justify all their wild behavior?
These evangelicals had better keep their eyes on the prize. Stop unu kwaaril; don’t scatter yourselves. Stop bickering and keep the focus on our friends who want to kick down di fence.
I’m astonished, Edmund Marshalleck
Like I couldn’t believe my ears the other night, couldn’t believe that a Belizean could be so far right capitalist, when I listened to Mr. Edmund Marshalleck on Jules Vasquez’s “Uncut” show on Channel Seven a couple weeks ago. I understand far right people in these super rich economies that built themselves on the backs of slaves and genocide, but in Belize, no, I really can’t see how they exist.
Edmund is the son of a former financial secretary, but I don’t know anything of his dad’s philosophy, because my entire adult years, up to when I appeared in a column in this newspaper, I lived in a different world. I kept up to date with goings-on by reading the local newspapers, and I am familiar with most of the politicians since the 1980s, but the movers and shakers on the lower rungs, I know them only by name.
Edmund is a big man in all PUP governments, and in this one he is the man at the helm of BEL, and he was/is the chair of the committee that was/is reviewing the deeds of the past government, a committee which has been all theater. You know, we are all wrong about corruption. It doesn’t exist in Belize. Mysteriously our vat keeps losing water, but there are no leaks, and the faucet is under padlock.
Someone correct me if I’m not 100% on the money here when I say I gathered from Mr. Marshalleck that in our region, countries like ours, we privatize public companies because they are inefficient, and then for the wrong reasons we nationalize them, and then, we know how night follows day, we have to privatize again…because publicly owned utilities are inefficient.
How can privatization of BEL, BTL, and BSWL take us out of poverty? Will privatizing these utilities make water, electricity, and telecommunications cheaper? No, all that will happen is that certain companies/families will get mighty rich, and our society will become more polarized. We’ve been down the privatization road before, and we got crushed.
It’s the corruption in our system that has us going around in circles. Our government leaders subvert the political structures, our business is run under the crony nepotism system, and that’s what leads some who do not look below the surface to tout privatization. All we need do is put the cramp on corruption!
Price was right about independence, and Esquivel was right about us keeping the golden share. There was room and there is room for private investment, but there is no room for people who are bigger than our country.